Drive Genius 3 has many uses and features to optimize and maintain your digital files. By utilizing the Shred, Scan and Initialize features, you can thoroughly test drives for bad blocks, as well as reformat and shred existing drives with previous data on them.
Zeroing out your drives can be especially important before installing drives into a RAID array where each and every component drive plays a part in the overall performance and reliability of the array.
Determination of a particular drive issue cannot be accomplished without breaking the array down and testing each component separately. And in the event of a performance problem – breaking the array down and testing each individual drive by zeroing it out is probably the best possible stress test before important data is stored on it.
Shredding a volume or drive will permanently remove all data. After the operation, a newly initialized HFS+ partition will appear on the desktop.
When shredding a volume, you may choose to shred the unused space by enabling Free Space Only. This will skip any active files and overwrite the free space of the drive to prevent previous files from being found.
To Shred a Drive or Volume:
Launch Drive Genius 3.
Click on the green arrow.
Click on the Shred icon.
Select the volume or drive you want to shred.
Select the Shred Strength for erasing the volume or drive.
Click on the Start button to proceed.
Checking for bad blocks on a drive before adding them into a RAID array is very important and shouldn’t be overlooked. This test is especially helpful to test the physical performance of the hard drive if you have experienced a slow down in accessing data. If you suspect you have multiple bad blocks that are re-occurring you may want to run a extended scan as a stress-test. If the extended scan can’t complete and resolve all the bad bad blocks you may conclude the drive is unreliable and taken out of the RAID set.
Extended Scan will verify the read and write ability of every sector on the hard drive. Unlike Spare Bad Blocks, which only writes for any found bad blocks, Extended Scan will read from every block and write the data back onto the same block to force the hard drive to reallocate any data from bad blocks. Enabling Extended Scan will greatly increase the time needed to complete the scan.
Drive Genius 3 – Spare Bad Blocks How to guide
Using Drive Genius 3 to pretest drives for RAID setup.
Mike Fiato
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